About that "Avatar" Sequel

When I recently ranked the Best Picture nominees of the last Oscars, I ranked "Avatar: The Way of Water" at the bottom of the list without much of an explanation.  However, after rewatching the film a few days ago, I thought that this wasn't fair.  I actually liked "The Way of Water" more than the original "Avatar," and it's far more interesting than the majority of blockbuster films released last year.  Just because I wouldn't put it among my favorite films of the year doesn't mean that it's not a significant accomplishment in filmmaking and it deserves its share of kudos.

So, when last we saw Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), he had left his human body behind and started a family with the Na'vi, Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), on the alien world of Pandora.  It's now many years later, and the two have four kids - boys Neteyem (Jamie Flatters) and Lo'ak (Britain Dalton), and girls Kiri (Sigourney Weaver) and Tuk (Trinity Jo-Li Bliss).  Kiri is the Na'vi daughter of Sigourney Weaver's character from the previous film, who the Sullys have adopted.  They're all friends with Spider (Jack Champion), a human boy raised by the few remaining scientists from Earth, who wasn't able to leave with the other humans after the Na'vi ejected them.  The invaders haven't given up, however.  Renewed efforts to take the planet commence under a new leader, General Ardmore (Edie Falco), who creates a new squad of Na'vi avatars, including one implanted with the memories and personality of Colonel Quaritch (Stephen Lang).  He's out for revenge, naturally, and targets Jake Sully and his family.   

The Sullys decide to leave their forest home and take refuge with the Metkayina clan, who populate the islands of Pandora and are close to the sealife of its oceans.  A good portion of the film is spent watching the Sullys learn to adapt to this new way of life.  They learn to ride the dinosaur-like Ilu, and Lo'ak befriends one of the intelligent, whale-like Tulkun, who the humans hunt.  The alien oceans are a more visually interesting environment than the forests, and give the special effects team the chance to design more alien creatures and ecosystems.  As with the first "Avatar," the effects work is absolutely gorgeous and immersive, and it's difficult to tell which elements are live action and which are digital.  The Na'vi characters are convincing to the point where I often forgot that I wasn't watching the live actors.  

I only wish that the story of "The Way of Water" lived up to the monumental efforts that were expended to bring it to the screen.  Jake Sully is a better protagonist here as a father trying to parent his teenage children through a rough transition, but he's still a remarkably dull sort of everyman stand-in, and I wish so much of the movie hadn't revolved around him.  Plenty is repeated from the first "Avatar," especially Colonel Quaritch once again leading ultra-aggressive military forces to disrupt the harmonious lives of the Na'vi, echoing the oppression of indigenous humans by colonizers.  The environmental allegory is also very blunt, with the Tulkun essentially being whales with an extra set of eyes, a few more fins, and the ability to psychically communicate with the Na'vi.  

I can't find much fault with the new characters, except that they're all very bland and very predictable.  Lo'ak is the screw-up son, Kiri has a mystical spiritual connection with the planet, and Tuk is the standard cute kid.  Sigourney Weaver performing Kiri occasionally gave me the oddest sense of dissociation, because Weaver mostly sounds like herself, but she's playing a fourteen year-old girl.  Spider is one of the more compelling characters because he's so visually unusual - a human who grew up with the Na'vi, even adopting their customs and behaviors - but is kidnapped by Quaritch's forces early on and spends most of the movie cordoned off with the baddies.  Likewise, Zoe Saldana is one of the better performers in the cast, but gets far too little to do as Neytiri until it's ass-kicking time in the last act.           

Probably the most surprising thing about the film is that it's not just repeating parts of "Avatar," but also some of James Cameron's other films.  The finale involves many of the characters trapped on a sinking ship, and some of the action sequences are awfully reminiscent of "Titanic," while others recall "The Abyss."  It all makes for a very exciting movie, so I'm not really complaining.  However, this confirmed for me that while "Avatar" might be showing off many new technological feats, poke around beneath the surface level, and you'll find Cameron playing all the old hits.  

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AI and Movies That Never Existed

So, ChatGPT and the various AI art generators that have caused so much fuss over the past few months have implications for creative work that I don't have the capacity to try and address.  We're still in the very nascent stages of this kind of technology.  However, I do want to put down some kind of response and reaction, so I'm going to start small, with the AI images from films that never existed.

Back in January, there was a fascinating New York Times article featuring stills from a 1978 version of "TRON" directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky that doesn't exist.   The images were created by Midjourney, which seems to be marketing itself as a tool for artists and designers.  Their Facebook page is full of examples of jawdropping artwork - ranging from photorealistic Deepfake style images to pastiches of famous artists to wild experiments like designing Medieval armor for your housepets.  The "TRON" article seems to have kicked off a trend of creating stills from other imaginary media.  Most of the ones that I've seen gone viral come from either Abandoned Films, responsible for "Balenciaga Star Wars," and Tenzon Tensor, which seems to be obsessed with reimagining everything as an "80s Dark Fantasy Film" including "Futurama" and "Spongebob Squarepants."  

The results of mashing together the different aesthetics vary wildly in quality, and depend largely on the creativity of the prompts.  I've been subscribed to the Abandoned Films Facebook page for a couple of weeks, and it's a little depressing how repetitive and limited the content is.  Nearly all the generated images involve putting genre franchises into a different time period, swapping around cast members, or applying the recognizable visual style of a different franchise.  PIXAR style "Harry Potter" characters are cute, and "The Matrix" style "Alice in Wonderland" has some good images, but "Game of Thrones" as a Wes Anderson film mostly just involves a palette swap, and "John Wick: Chapter 27" just looks like stills from the previous "John Wick" films with Keanu Reeves in old age makeup.  Everything involving video game franchises and zombies tends to look the same.  It feels pointless to do LEGO anything, because there are LEGO products for a ton of popular franchises already.

If you've been around fanart spaces, you'll know that images like this have been around for a long time.  Artists have dreamed up steampunk "Star Wars" designs" and what Marvel superheroes would look like in the "TRON" universe.  There was a recent "Gotham by Gaslight" animated movie that gave us a Victorian era Batman.  Fancasting with Photoshopped images has been commonplace.  What the AI image generators offer is a way to do this much more quickly and produce images that are more complex, including photorealistic renderings.  However, the programs have major limitations and require a lot of finessing.  Midjourney famously can't handle hands or certain body positions.  You might be able to cut the artist out of the equation, but you have to really know your references and know some artistic fundamentals to avoid churning out generic-looking pap.  And once you know what to look for, you absolutely can spot an AI generated image pretty easily.                          

There's legalities to be worked out involving copyrights on these images, and the debate over the use of certain artists' work for reference images, and all sorts of impacts on artists that I'm sure we haven't run across yet.  However, from what I've seen of the AI image generators' output so far, I'm inclined to side with the crowd that views this as a tool more than some kind of replacement for creative jobs.  The Corridor Crew recently worked out a way to turn live action footage into a pretty decent looking anime by running it through a program that made the actors look like "Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust" characters.  If you know your animation history, that's essentially rotoscoping with fewer laborious steps.  However, it still took the creators a significant amount of time and talent to make use of the new tools.  

  

I'd love to try out Midjourney myself, but googling the potential prompts I'd give it, I've found that real artists have often gotten there first.  It's been fun to stumble across some of the better Midjourney movie mashups, like what might have happened if David Cronenberg said yes to directing "Return of the Jedi" back in the 80s, but I think there's a reason only a few of these AI generated experiments have gone viral.  The AI is faster, but so far it's definitely far from better.    

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"Extraordinary" Gets the Ordinary

While we all know that LGBT rom-com "Love, Victor" is on Hulu because Disney is run by a pack of cowards, "Extraordinary" is on Hulu because that's exactly where it belongs.  This show is for mature audiences, though the premise and characters are anything but mature.  

Created by Emma Moran as one of the first UK productions for Disney streaming, "Extraordinary" is a superhero themed comedy, set in a world where everyone gets a superpower after they turn eighteen.  A trio of twenty-something friends - Jen (Máiréad Tyers), Carrie (Sofia Oxenham), and Kash (Bilal Hasna) - share a flat and attempt to navigate adulthood together.  Carrie is a conduit for deceased spirits, and works for a law firm that specializes in probate law.  Her boyfriend Kash can rewind time a few minutes, and is obsessed with the idea of putting together his own vigilante group.  Then there's our main character, Jen, who despite being twenty-four shows no sign of having a superpower.  She works a dead end job at a party store.  Eventually the threesome are also joined by Jizzlord (Luke Rollason), a shapeshifter with amnesia who was stuck as a cat for three years, and is having to relearn how to be human.    

I enjoy the way that this show handles superpowers, which is to use each character's relationship with their powers to demonstrate their personality.  Some powers are cool, some are awkward and embarrassing, and some are just a hindrance.  Powers are so normalized in this universe, nobody is really surprised by the insane things that people are able to accomplish with them.  People with cooler powers like flight or teleportation tend to be coded as more successful and desirable than the ones with oddball powers - like the dweeby guy who can cause people to orgasm through any skin contact.  However, some people with great powers, like Kash or Jen's mum (Siobhán McSweeney), don't do much with them.  Also, while the show features a lot of superpowers in every single episode, it's not really what the show is about.  Front and center are always the trio's growing pains, and the show works because those growing pains are true to life.

Jen not having powers is the bane of her existence.  It's a metaphor for her not having her life together and feeling left behind by her peers.  She has an ongoing rivalry with her younger sister Andy (Safia Oakley-Green), who is more talented and poised for success.  She's in love with Luke (Ned Porteous), who will hook up with her, but won't consider her romantically.  Her friendships are all she has to depend on, and they're pretty chaotic since all of these youngsters are in a constant state of flux.  The show's depiction of twenty-something life is on point.  Sex and rude language are rampant.  There aren't any real enemies, but just one uncomfortable situation after another - job interviews, family obligations, and bad dates.  The tone is closer to "Girls" than "The Boys," though the content isn't as strong - all nudity is kept just out of frame. 

The budget for the first couple of episodes must have been considerable with the amount of special effects required to include all of these superpowers.  However, it's to the show's credit that they frequently feel completely mundane.  I barely noticed when the show shifted to more character-based hijinks, because by then the show had done the work of getting us to care about the characters separate from their abilities.  The cast is great, with Máiréad Tyers walking that thin line between being lovable and terrible, while Luke Rollason steals every scene with his perpetually befuddled expressions and physical oddity.  Watching him trying to work a can opener is a highlight.    

Would I have watched "Extraordinary" if it weren't a genre show?  Probably not.  I lasted all of three episodes with "Girls," and tend to avoid coming of age titles.  I'm still not quite over the bildungsroman burnout I experienced a few years ago.  I like the characters here enough that  I'll stick with "Extraordinary" for a while regardless.  I'm on the same wavelength with the show as far as humor, which doesn't happen too often these days.  I appreciate that more than anything else.   

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We Have Met the "Fleishman" and He is Us

New York City is the traditional habitat of the neurotic Jewish screen hero.  The latest is Dr. Toby Fleishman (Jesse Eisenberg), who discovers one day that his ex-wife Rachel (Claire Danes) has disappeared.  She has left their two children, Hanna (Meara Mahoney Gross) and Solly (Maxim Jasper Swinton), with Toby and can't be reached by any means.  This leads to Toby's life being sent into a tailspin as he tries to juggle work and parenting commitments, while still grappling with the fallout of the recent divorce.  Dating, friendships, and existential terror are also in the mix as Toby tries to find a way forward.

"Fleishman is in Trouble," created by Taffy Brodesser-Akner for FX, based on her own book, is an eight episode miniseries about trying to survive the tumult of being in your forties.  This includes confronting failing relationships, stagnant careers, living with unappealing life choices, and being lonely.  As someone who is the same age as the major characters, and who can't help noticing how much some of these familiar actors have aged since I saw them last, the show feels a bit therapeutic.  It's nice when a piece of media affirms your worries and concerns about the state of your own life.   Toby and friends are a passel of very privileged Upper East Side overachievers, and their problems are problems that they're lucky to have.  However, that doesn't mean the show isn't relatable, or that its characters aren't sympathetic.  

With a very talented cast, and the veteran directing teams of Valerie Faris & Jonathan Dayton, and Shari Springer Berman & Robert Pulcini handling nearly all the episodes, a talky dramedy about uncomfortable subjects is kept very watchable and occasionally manages to be awfully touching and insightful.  The show starts with Toby, and devotes the bulk of the story to the various stages of his crisis, but an equally important character is his college friend Libby (Lizzie Caplan), who serves as the narrator and a source of friendly support.  There are some interesting narrative conceits going on, involving flashbacks, POV shifts, and doubling back on events in different contexts.  It takes a while before it becomes clear how Libby figures into the show's big picture and the impact of Toby's crisis on her own life.  However, the incremental nature of the storytelling is the point, showing how the characters have a  very narrow understanding of their issues and avoid hard truths about themselves, despite their self obsession.  It's a very grown-up approach with little hand-holding and sugar coating.

There are some rougher patches here, and I almost gave up after two episodes, when it seemed like "Fleishman" was going to spend a lot of time in the world of modern dating.  This is not the case, as examining Toby's love life is only one piece of a much larger and more complicated exploration of his psyche.  Also, I didn't enjoy watching Toby initially - he seemed far more self-involved and selfish than he was willing to admit to himself, and it was very satisfying when it turned out that the show's creators agreed with me.  The payoff just took a little longer than I was expecting.  Fans of Danes and Caplan might be unhappy to discover that they have relatively little screen time compared to Eisenberg, but boy do they make it count.  Danes gets an entire episode focused on Rachel late in the series that is one of the best hours of television of 2022.    

In short, this is a show that needs patience, but it's worth the trouble to see all the way through.  I've watched a lot of movies about the encroachment of middle age, and the guilt of not being able to enjoy your own success.  I think the reason why "Fleishman" struck such a chord with me is because it's so specifically about my generation and my cohort - the older Millennials who thought their luck and privilege could shield them from unhappiness.  Having Eisenberg and Danes in the lead roles, who I've been watching onscreen since they were playing angsty teenagers, hammers it home especially hard.  Getting old and dealing with inevitable disappointment is something everyone will have to face, and the angst never goes away completely.  

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"The Great," Year Three

Mild spoilers for the first two seasons ahead.

I'll be disappointed if there's a fourth season of "The Great," because the third wraps up the series so nicely.  I'm sure the show could have gone on for a few more years, but Tony McNamara and the other creatives wisely decided to steer their "occasionally true" story of Catherine the Great back toward actual history.  This is the season where consequences finally catch up to many of the characters, and Catherine sheds some of her naiveté to truly become a formidable empress.    

The first part of the season finds Catherine and Peter in an uneasy truce after their latest clash, with everyone else at court still nervously sorting out their allegiances.  Catherine elevates Elizabeth and Archie into the position of her primary advisors, and is on the outs with Marial.  Grigor finds himself being supplanted as Peter's best friend by King Hugo (Freddie Fox), who is still at the Russian court with Queen Agnes (Grace Molony), trying to find support for retaking Sweden.  George enthusiastically joins Catherine's side, though no one can tell if she means it.  Velementov becomes ill and Peter's double Pugachev takes on a new role.  And the body count increases significantly.

After two seasons of chaos and silliness, it's nice to discover that "The Great" can take itself seriously when it wants to.  While there's still regular bawdiness and comic violence this year, the show plays Catherine and Peter's relationship troubles and existential crises straight.  The grieving process, in particular, is treated with admirable care and consideration.  The major dilemma this season is dealing with a peasant uprising that threatens Catherine's reign, and challenges some of her deepest assumptions about herself and her right to rule.  I like that Catherine herself is positioned as an antagonist as she goes through periods of instability.  As she grows more comfortable with power, she acts more like Peter - making decisions at a whim, terrifying her court, and habitually flinging glassware.  Her assaults on Russian tradition grow more and more contentious, until the backlash is so extreme she can no longer ignore it.  She's exasperating, unreasonable, and hypocritical this year, and finally has to become self-aware.   

The last few episodes where Catherine finally grows into her power are pretty thrilling to see, but I'm still primarily here for the comedy, and the ensemble does not let me down.  Freddie Fox and Grace Molony are fantastic as the scheming Swedes, who decide seduction is the best path to gaining allies.  A big highlight is Marial's prepubescent husband Maxim (Henry Meredith), who becomes an active participant in all the court intrigue this year.  He reveals a love of fancy shoes and bloodshed, challenging Grigor to a duel in the second episode, and plotting assassinations by the end of the season.  George's devious maid Petra (Emily Coates) also gets an upgrade to spy, blackmailer, and co-conspirator.  However, Elle Fanning and Nicholas Hoult continue to wipe the floor with everyone, and Hoult is pulling double duty this year as both Peter and his grimy double Pugachev.  

    

The writing remains very good.  I'm impressed that McNamara and his fellow writers managed to come to satisfying conclusions for just about everyone in the sprawling cast - well, except Orlo, who's primarily a punchline this year.  If you've had enough of the royals, Elizabeth, Marial, and Grigor are all great to follow through this season, finally working out what they really want and who they really want.  "The Great" also continues to be the most sex-positive show on any network or service, with people constantly shown having and enjoying sex.  That's still far more of a rarity than it should be.  

I'm going to miss "The Great," but this is a clear endpoint for the series, and we're lucky to have had it go on for as long as it did.  I'll probably put together a Top Ten list for individual episodes where I'll go into some spoilers and discuss the events of this season in more detail.  So stay tuned.    

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My Favorite Melvin van Peebles Movie

I'm showing my own biases here by picking "Watermelon Man" as my favorite Melvin van Peebles movie.  "Sweet Sweetback" had a far larger and more lasting impact, and Van Peebles had far more creative control.  However, it was a film made for black Americans.  "Watermelon Man" was a studio comedy aimed at white audiences and the lead character is for all intents and purposes a white man.  And even though I'm not white, I found myself relating more to his view of the world than the black hero of "Sweetback."  

Godfrey Cambridge spends the first twenty minutes of the film in whiteface playing a caricature of a white American bigot named Jeff Gerber.  And initially, "Watermelon Man" is a rare satire on white America from a black point of view.  The film was marketed as a broad comedy and the filmmaking often reflects this, with its colorful stylistic touches and TV sitcom visuals.  However, one morning Jeff wakes up with dark skin, and the film becomes more earnestly critical of the state of American race relations.  This is especially clear in the second half, when all the physical hijinks involving Jeff trying to undo the transformation are dispensed with, and he has to confront the change being permanent.     

From the outset, Van Peebles is fearlessly confrontational about the subject of race, and "Watermelon Man" is a good time capsule of the prevailing attitudes of the early 70s.  The bulk of his criticism is reserved for the characters who seem friendly and tolerant, but either prove to be different in private or have ulterior motives.  Jeff may be a bigot, but he's honest about it, while his liberal wife is not.  Because he's so used to speaking his mind, he calls out every hypocrisy and absurdity attempting to camouflage racism that he encounters.  It's funny at first, but less and less so as the film goes on.  Jeff doesn't become a better person when his skin turns black, but he's forced to become a very different one, inhabiting an entirely different reality.  And Van Peebles shows that he doesn't fully become a black man until he's lost everything - including his ability to deny reality.  The final image of his enthusiasm for self-betterment morphing into a revolutionary impulse is both sobering and electrifying.

This was a very different picture of race in America than the more polite, more restrained discussions found in movies like "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner."  What is so striking about "Watermelon Man" is that it's so self aware of what it's doing, often brimming over with tension and barely disguised pain, hidden just underneath the laugh lines.  The dialogue is full of wry little observations about life as a black man, and subversions of common Hollywood narratives.  There's a major action sequence built around Jeff being chased by a mob because they think he stole something - why else would he be in a part of town that no other African Americans frequent?  The most gutting moments are the most intimate, such as when Jeff realizes that the white secretary who is so eager to sleep with him only does so because she's fetishizing his blackness.  And consider the casting of Mantan Moreland, who was famous for playing stereotyped servant characters in the blackface era, as a counterman who looks down on Jeff once he's black.

Melvin van Peebles is a fascinating figure in American cinema, who went to extraordinary lengths to direct films.  He's revealed in interviews that behind the scenes of "Watermelon Man," writers and executives wanted to tone down the messaging and give the film a "happy" ending where Jeff's experience as a black man was all just a dream.  The director resorted to outright sabotage to ensure that this didn't happen.  "Watermelon Man" was Van Peeble's only studio project, and it was a box office success.  He could have gone on making more films in this vein, but quit in order to make the far more risky and rebellious "Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song" independently.  And the rest is history.

There's a tiresome claim that you couldn't make movies with controversial content like "Blazing Saddles" today.  I'm sure you could update "Watermelon Man" for modern audiences, but I don't know that you'd need to.  After over fifty years, the state of American race relations had barely changed.  Most of the attitudes of the white characters are depressingly familiar, and the jokes about racial stereotypes and the use of the n-word still work just fine in context.  Just substitute the "race riots" with the BLM movement, and nobody would blink an eye.  

What I've Seen - Melvin van Peebles

The Story of a Three-Day Pass (1968)
Watermelon Man (1970)
Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971)
Don't Play Us Cheap (1973)
Gang in Blue (1996)

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"Mayfair Witches" is Awfully Mid

I probably had my expectations for this show raised too high after AMC's new "Interview With the Vampire" series.  The creators did such a good job with Anne Rice's vampires that I thought they'd have a similarly good take on the witches.  Sadly, "Mayfair Witches" is a pretty tame undertaking, starring Alexandra Daddario as a neurosurgeon named Rowan Fielding who discovers that she's one of the powerful Mayfair family, a New Orleans based, matrilineal dynasty with supernatural gifts.  These gifts are largely due to the influence of a dark spirit named Lasher (Jack Huston) who has been bound to a "designee" of each generation of Mayfairs since the 1600s.

The show looks expensive, largely set in and around New Orleans, where Rowan comes in search of her roots.  She soon finds her mother Deirdre (Annabeth Gish), who has been in a semi-catatonic state for decades.  Other members of the family are played by veteran character actors Beth Grant and Harry Hamlin, and Daddario has been steadily improving as an actress as her profile has risen, so the show doesn't lack for good acting talent.  A significant amount of time is spent tracing Lasher's history with prior generations of the Mayfair family.  The period sequences are some of the show's high points, beautifully executed with excellent production design.  The effects work is also top drawer, and used to pull off some suitably creepy and memorable scenes of witchiness.

The writing, sadly, hits some major stumbling blocks.  There are some good notions here, like having flashbacks to the life of the first Mayfair witch, a Scottish midwife named Suzanne (Hannah Alline), who was wrongly persecuted.  We're also introduced to the curious Talamasca organization, which keeps tabs on supernatural entities in Anne Rice's universe.  One of their agents, Ciprien (Tongayi Chirisa), becomes a potential love interest for Rowan.  However, there are just as many bad notions.  There are far too many characters who appear for an episode or two, and then quickly exit the story.  For a show that's supposed to center on a family, there's not much time or attention paid to developing most of the familial relationships.  Instead, too many of the threats are external, like the Talamasca and a rather silly mob of modern-day witch hunters.  I'd much rather be digging into the sordid pasts of Grant or Hamlin's Mayfair elders, or spending more time with Lasher.

As much as I like Alexandra Daddario in this show, Rowan is not a strong heroine.  She displays some minor resistance to becoming the prophesied chosen one of the story, but ultimately doesn't seem too bothered about being roped into the Mayfair antics.  And frankly, she's completely outmatched.  Lasher is easily the most interesting character in the show.  He's the dangerous, unpredictable one who keeps the story moving and has the most fascinating relationships.  He's the enabler of all the magic and violence we see, and is the one who appears in every time period and every era of the Mayfair story.  However, his relationship with Rowan is anticlimactic and frankly not very sexy, despite the show not being shy about showing sexuality onscreen.  There's way too much mythology being expounded on, and not enough meat.  Rowan's relationship with Ciprian is similarly pretty boring, practically perfunctory.       

I've never read the "Mayfair" books, but the adaptation seems significantly toned down regarding the more controversial elements.  Whenever it moves into horror territory the results aren't bad, and I appreciate that the show's portrayal of magic tends to be less wondrous and more unsettling.  However, it's really only in the last episode that we get anything truly weird and gut-wrenching.  If the show gets more seasons, I'm sure it'll move into the more risky material.  However, there's not much in the first season that distinguishes "Mayfair Witches" from similar shows like "A Discovery of Witches" and "True Blood."  I expected more operatic guts and glory from an Anne Rice adaptation, and instead this is something much more lukewarm.   The few attempts to be more socially relevant, the way that "Interview" managed so beautifully, don't really lead anywhere either.        

  

I'll probably give "Mayfair" another season to course correct, because everything necessary for a much better show is right here, but so far it's a disappointment.

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"Cocaine Bear" and "The Whale"

I group these two titles together, not because they both have animals in their titles, but because these are both bad movies that are bad in very different ways.  This is by no means a universally held opinion.  One of these movies made a lot of money at the box office while the other won two Academy Awards.

"Cocaine Bear" is more understandably a bad movie, because it's trying to be a throwback to creature features of the '80s, which were always pretty dubious in construction.  It has a killer premise, very, very loosely based on an incident where a black bear managed to consume massive amounts of lost cocaine from a smuggling operation gone wrong.  The real bear died almost instantly, but the film decides that the bear should go on a drug-fueled rampage and encounter several unlucky human beings.  A vastly overqualified cast has been assembled to play the victims, including a park ranger (Margo Martindale), a wildlife activist (Jesse Tyler Ferguson), a cop (Isiah Whitlock Jr.), a couple of guys trying to recover the cocaine (Alden Ehrenreich, O'Shea Jackson Jr.), their boss (Ray Liotta), a hiker couple (Kristofer Hivju), some paramedics (Kahyun Kim, Scott Seis), a pair of kids (Brooklynn Prince, Christian Convery), and a stressed out mom (Keri Russell).   

None of these characters are well fleshed out in any sense, because the point isn't to get to know them.  It's to root for the bear to kill off most of them in the most funny and grisly ways possible.  There are dismemberments, eviscerations, and a big sequence with an ambulance that is the clear high point of the movie.  The bear, rendered with CGI good enough to not call much attention to itself, is attacking humans because it wants more cocaine.  It is essentially the shark from "Jaws," popping up every few minutes to cause chaos for whomever it meets in its path.  This is pretty entertaining the first few times we see it, but the novelty wears off quickly.  "Cocaine Bear" is also trying to be a comedy, and most of the humor is of the shock and awe variety.  The cast get a couple of good line readings in, and there are some genuinely eyebrow-raising scenes involving drug consumption, but otherwise the movie is pretty tame.  Elizabeth Banks gamely shepherds along the hijinks, never letting the bad behavior get too out of hand.  In the end, the movie is what it says on the poster.  Bear on cocaine acts funny.  Everyone screams.  Not a lot else happens, but if easy thrills are what you're after, you could do a lot worse than "Cocaine Bear."

Now "The Whale" is a film of higher ambition, directed by Darren Aronofsky.  Written by Samuel D. Hunter, based on his own play, the film is about a grossly obese man named Charlie (Brendan Fraser) who is desperately trying to reconnect to his teenage daughter Ellie (Sadie Sink) before he succumbs to his numerous health problems.  Charlie's only friend is a nurse named Liz (Hong Chau), who is trying to keep him alive and makes regular visits.  Otherwise, Charlie is isolated from human contact, teaching online writing courses with his camera off during Zoom calls, and hiding from the food delivery guy.  There's a subplot with a young Christian missionary named Thomas (Ty Simpkins), who knocks on the door one day and takes an interest in Charlie's salvation.    

Because it's Darren Aronofsky, the misery of Charlie's existence is put into uncomfortably sharp focus.  Fraser and the makeup team went to great lengths to transform the actor into a grotesquely ill man at the end of his life.  It is dangerously close to being exploitative, and occasionally veers into distasteful territory.  Charlie's physical appearance is often a distraction from what "The Whale" is trying to do with the characters, which is to give a seemingly unredeemable man a chance to undo some of the damage he's caused, even when it seems to be too late.  However, the metaphors about faith and art are entirely too blunt, and the dialogue too histrionic.  Charlie is positioned almost like a Christ figure, a sweet tempered man who overeats out of unresolved grief, while the people that he's wronged - Ellie and her mother Mary (Samantha Morton) - are vicious and awful in every interaction they have with him.  Aronofsky can't seem to help underlining the unpleasantness, making the visuals very bleak and claustrophobic.  

And yet, there are good reasons to watch the film.  Brendan Fraser's performance has rightly won accolades, and is the peak of his comeback to date.  Hong Chau does memorable work with a very thin character.  Everyone involved with the film is clearly trying their best to make something meaningful out of the mess, and there's a lot of ambition here that I don't see onscreen often enough.  This is not a good film, but perhaps we can say it is a nobly misguided one.  Maybe in the hands of a less astringent director, or with a more seasoned writer, I can see how a better, more worthwhile film could have come about.  "The Whale" is bad, but a better kind of bad than we normally see at the movies. 

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Don't Sleep on "Missing"

Remember the 2018 film "Searching," where we watched John Cho conduct a search for his missing teenage daughter, almost entirely through his internet activity, security cameras, and other onscreen interactions?  Well, five years and a pandemic later, we're all living out more of our lives through screens than ever, and "Missing" reflects many new developments in technology, and new online services that have been adopted in our everyday lives.  "Searching" writers Aneesh Chaganty and Sev Ohanian are back, with a new directing team, Will Merrick and Nick Johnson, for a new mystery to solve.

Eighteen year-old June Allen (Storm Reid) discovers that her mother Grace (Nia Long) and Grace's boyfriend Kevin (Ken Leung) haven't returned from their vacation to Colombia.  Frustrated with the authorities, June takes matters into her own hands, hiring a Taskrabbit worker named Javier (Joaquim de Almeida) to help search in Colombia, and breaking into protected accounts to dig into the pasts of her mother and Kevin.  June is tech savvy, and uses online translators, social engineering techniques, and even Siri to her advantage.  However, she makes mistakes, runs into many dead ends, and everyone in her life seems to be keeping secrets.

"Missing" is a more self assured film than "Searching," with a better facility with the visual language of screen life.  The scene transitions are a big improvement, showing time skips, switches in POV, flashbacks, and some of June's thought processes through clever editing.  There are a couple of funny moments built on common annoyances like reCAPTCHA and autocorrected texts, and some thrilling reveals that turn on little things like someone accidentally sending a live photo instead of a traditional one.  A few moments, like lingering on a suspect's picture too long, or June's habit of filling the screen with pinned notes struck me as too much obvious hand-holding, but these were few and far between.

The mystery itself is very contrived, but it has to be for this kind of story.  I found the writing very clever in the ways that it incorporate so many different apps and services, and keeps subverting our expectations about various characters.  Unlike "Searching," "Missing" is less worried about trying to stay grounded in the real world and more willing to indulge in sensationalism.  Some of the plot twists are a bit much, but this also makes "Missing" more fun to watch than "Searching," with a big action climax and a punch-the-air finale.  This is one of the better mystery thrillers I've seen in a while.        

I like all the actors here, but Storm Reid deserves the most praise for carrying the film.  June is technically an adult, but still very much a teenager with a rebellious streak.  Her exploration of her relationship with her mother, full of secrets and lies, forms the emotional backbone of the film.  Reid is winning and sympathetic throughout, vulnerable enough to root for, and fallible enough to provide some tension.  This movie and her work in "The Last of Us" should give her a good boost in visibility.  It's also good to see Ken Leung in another role that properly takes advantage of his skill at playing untrustworthy types. 

As with "Searching," "Missing" has excellent worldbuilding.  June's screens are full of little easter eggs and humorous details that reward rewatching.  Because June is more comfortable in this world than John Cho's character in "Searching," the pace is a little quicker and the more shortcuts are used.  However, it's still a very accessible film and oddly more innovative and exciting from a filmmaking standpoint than nearly everything else I've seen so far in 2023.       

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The 2022 Movies I Didn't See

I write this post every year to acknowledge some of the movies that I've made a conscious decision to skip watching.  In some cases there's a reason, and in some cases there's just a lack of enthusiasm.  I've got very strong completionist tendencies, so I hope writing about some of these films this way will help me put any lingering doubts to rest.  So, here are seven films below that didn't make the cut this year.   I reserve the right to revisit and reverse my viewing choices in the future. However, I still haven't watched anything from last year's list. 

"Smile" and "Speak No Evil" - Horror is always a tough category for me.  2022 was a great year for horror movies, and I liked plenty of them.  However, I still take a pause whenever I encounter films with more nihilist attitudes.  "Nope" and "Barbarian" aren't going to keep me up at night, but a movie like the Dutch thriller "Speak No Evil," about a family's annihilation, hits way too close to home.  European horror films also tend to get under my skin way more than their American counterparts, because they're more willing to go to upsetting places.  As for "Smile," it immediately turned me off because of the creepy imagery, and because I learned that the plot is essentially the same as "It Follows," but with more graphic violence, and they actually show the creature.  No thanks.

"To Leslie" - I'm sure that this is a good movie, but the more I learn about the campaigning controversy around the Oscar nomination for lead actress Andrea Riseborough, the cooler I get on actually watching the film.  Frankly, "To Leslie" has all the earmarks of a typical Oscar "Also Ran."  It's a woman struggling against addiction story, it's got dysfunctional family relationships, and it's got a "big heart."  Good grief, I'm glad the campaigning wasn't more prevalent, because that sentiment is just awful.  It's not like I've got some bias against the smaller films - "Aftersun" is a similarly underseen indie made on a shoestring budget.  However, "To Leslie" had absolutely no buzz and no critical attention outside the Oscar voter bubble.  The only person I could find who had it on their year end Top Ten list was Richard Roeper.  

"Nanny" and "Emergency" - I've wrestled with some guilt over both of these titles, because they both deal with the black experience at their cores.  One is a genre film about a recent African immigrant who is haunted by supernatural forces.  One is a dark comedy where two black college guys try to help an unconscious white girl with disastrous results.  However, they're both also films I would be avoiding no matter the background of the main characters.  Anything involving early motherhood guilt has been rough for me since "Thelma," and "Emergency" just sounds like some unholy combination of "Superbad" and "After Hours" that offers an excess amount of anxiety that I don't need in my life.  

"Emancipation" - I could have grouped this together with the previous black-led films, but "Emancipation" needs to be singled out for additional comments.  First, since Will Smith got his Oscar, I no longer feel obligated to watch the self-serious prestige projects that he's been so keen on after giving up blockbuster stardom.  But more than that, Antoine Fuqua hasn't made a film I've liked in far too long, and I have no interest in watching him take on a Civil War era story.  Maybe if he had a different leading man or if there were any kind of enthusiasm from critics or viewers, I'd feel differently.  As it stands, I'm more than happy to leave this at the bottom of my list  

"A Man Called Otto" - Finally, we have to talk about Tom Hanks.  I'm thrilled that this movie is doing well in theaters, but I was never going to watch it.  I've already seen the film it was based on, "A Man Called Ove," and disliked it.  This is a straight remake from what I've seen from the trailers and viewer reactions, so I'm not interested.  I'm glad Tom Hanks has a win, but it's coming after a long string of underwhelming appearances like the leads of "Greyhound," and "Finch," and his notorious turn as Colonel Parker in "Elvis."  As our reliable everyman has moved into parts for older actors, the quality has taken a serious nosedive.  And it's such a shame.       

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My Top Ten Films of 1947

This is part of my continuing series looking back on films from the years before I began this blog. The ten films below are unranked and listed in no particular order. Enjoy.

"Dark Passage" - An exciting Bogey and Bacall film noir about an escaped convict that uses the unusual technique of showing the majority of the action from the first person POV of Bogart's character, with a "subjective camera."  His character's face is also covered in bandages from plastic surgery, so we don't actually get to see his famous mug until the last few minutes of the movie - and the reveal is worth it.  

"The Lady From Shanghai" - A fairly typical murder plot is rendered immortal by Orson Welles' finale sequence that takes place in a hall of mirrors.  Welles stars alongside his ex-wife Rita Hayworth, and famously didn't take a directing credit as the surviving cut is much shorter and  very different from what Welles had originally assembled.  Alas, like "The Magnificent Ambersons," the removed footage has never been found.  

"Lured" - Before Lucille Ball became a comedy icon, she was a bona fide screen star.  This is my favorite of her early pictures, where she plays a dancer recruited to go undercover by the police, and has to go up against a fiend played by Boris Karloff, among other villains.  George Sanders is first billed, but it's Ball's picture.  This is also a good example of the early work of director Douglas Sirk, before he would go make his famous 50s melodramas.  

"Miracle on 34th Street" - Who could resist a premise like this, where Santa Claus comes to New York City and eventually has to prove his identity in court?  Edmund Gwenn is a delight as Kris Kringle, Natalie Wood is perfect, and the finale with the letters all being delivered in the middle of the hearing is absolutely joyous.  This one has earned its reputation for being one of the classic Christmas movies, even if it has become less well known.

"Nightmare Alley" - I suspect that I only remember this film so well because of the recent Guillermo Del Toro remake, and frankly I prefer the remake.  However, that doesn't take away from how unsettling and how psychologically complex the original is, charting the rise and downfall of a con man with a spiritualism act.  The cast is very good, especially Tyrone Power as the leading man.  The nihilistic ending is especially memorable.  

"Black Narcissus" - One of Powell and Pressburger's undisputed masterpieces is this gorgeous, epic tale of a group of nuns who try to establish a convent in the Himalayas, and underestimate the psychological effects of the environment on their members.  Kathleen Byron as the unstable Sister Ruth is unforgettable, but it's the production design, with its searing colors mirroring the psychology of the characters, that really has to be seen.

"Brute Force" - A prison drama with Burt Lancaster that builds to a terrific climax.  This was the first of Jules Dassin's crime films, with a focus on showing the inhumane conditions of the justice system that prisoners were forced to endure.  I expected the messaging to have a negative effect on the drama, especially since it's so blunt, but this isn't the case.  The tragic ending is so much more impactful with the weight of so much real world importance involved.

"The Pearl" - A Mexican-American co-production brings John Steinbeck's novel to the big screen.  Boldly emotional and very faithful to the source material, the film critically depicts the social mechanisms that keep a poor family from finding a better life, even though they're received a rare windfall.  The suspense and action sequences are especially impressive, with strong black and white cinematography capturing the roughness of the characters' lives.

"Record of a Tenement Gentlemen" - An early Yasujiro Ozu film that follows a poor widow who is obliged to take in an abandoned child, and through him regains a purpose in life.  I was expecting a very different kind of story, and was utterly won over by Ozu's portrayal of the funny, touching, and very bumpy relationship that develops between the foster mother and her foster son, and the hardscrabble community surrounding the pair.   

"Dreams that Money Can Buy" - Finally, this is a collection of experimental shorts from some of the great visual artists of the surrealist and dadaist movements. Contributors include Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, Alexander Calder, Fernand Leger, and Man Ray.  The shorts range from Duchamp's spinning disc illusions to a love story between mannequins.

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Adventures in Mobile Gaming, 2023

It's been a while since I've written anything about gaming, which in my case means mobile gaming.  After a long hiatus I picked up Candy Crush again for a few months, played way too much, quit, and decided to sample a bunch of different games from the app store to get a better idea of what was available.  The goal was to try other gameplay that wasn't just using the match-three mechanism that "Bejewelled" and "Candy Crush" and "Disney Emoji: Blitz" all have. 

The first games I tried were "Match Tile 3D" and "Triple Match 3D" - made by different companies despite the similar names.  These are games where you have to sort through a pile of 3D objects and match them up.  I liked the gameplay, but not the fact that the levels were timed, so it was the opposite of the kind of relaxing, stress-free experience I was looking for.  And as with all of the newer games, the amount of ads was oppressive.  Every single level required watching an additional ad.  I don't mind them in moderation, or when the ads are attached to bonuses, the way they are in "Candy Crush," but this was too much.

"Tile Connect" was next on the list - another puzzle game where you have to connect tiles on a grid based on matching pictures, but the tiles have to share a common border or be accessible by a connecting line that can only have three angles.  However, the gameplay was too simple for me, and I lost interest quickly.  Some of the levels had tile patterns that were beautifully designed, and others were terrible, that looked like someone had used random theme emojis.  Again, there were ads after every single level, and a timer on the gameplay that got to be too oppressive after the first few rounds.  These ads in particular were terrible - mostly for other mobile games that required multiple clicks and timers to complete.    

However, the game that I found with the worst prevalence of ads was "Tap Away 3D."  This was actually my favorite game that I tried out, because it actually had more challenging gameplay than the others.  Each level gives you a 3D formation made up of blocks that can only be moved in one direction, and you have to remove them all piece by piece.  The formations become increasingly complex and challenging, but there's no timer so you can work at your own pace.  However, the ads were tied to the amount you played - usually the number of pieces that were removed.  That meant multiple ads interrupting the gameplay on every level.  The notorious Playrix ads continue to be the most annoying, and the app was rife with them.  I briefly considered buying the game, but the reviews point out that this only removes some of the ads rather than all of them, so I just abandoned ship.

I saw multiple ads featuring a matching game that sorted through shelved items, so I tracked down  "Goods Triple Match 3D."  However, the gameplay wasn't the same.  The ad showed the shelves collapsing and disappearing in the game when you made a successful match, while in the game this doesn't happen.  I played through fifty levels just to make sure that this wasn't something that was only available at the higher levels, and the shelves never moved.  This was very disappointing.  What was even more disappointing was when I discovered that the original ads weren't even for "Goods Triple Match 3D."  The ads were specifically for "Match Tile 3D" and "Triple Match 3D," which don't even feature shelved items.  Are we sure they're made by separate companies?  I know Playrix got into some trouble for featuring "Homescape" and "Gardenscape" ads that featured gameplay that didn't exist in those games, so I thought we were past this kind of nonsense.        

    

Finally, I wanted to try a hidden object game - essentially a game with gameplay similar to children's "seek and find" puzzles.  Nearly all of these are mystery themed, with detectives interviewing people as a framing device.  "June's Journey" is one of the most popular, with few obnoxious ads and no timers on the gameplay.  The puzzles aren't too challenging, though you occasionally have to confront the fact that you have no idea what a sconce looks like.  The one aspect I don't like is that part of the game involves a second type of gameplay - building a grand estate on an island with your earnings from passing each level.  It's a home renovation game similar to "Homescapes."  Still, this isn't the main thrust of "June's Journey," and mostly serves to keep players from progressing through levels too quickly..  

To date, it's the only one of these games I haven't deleted.  

   

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"Saint Omer" and "Till"

"Saint Omer," named after a town in France, is an unusual courtroom drama in that it frames everything from the POV of an onlooker with no connection to the case.  Director Alice Diop based the story on her own experience with a similar trial.  Her stand-in is a literature professor, Rama (Kayije Kagame), who is pregnant and at a crossroads in her life.  She attends the trial of a woman named Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanda) who is responsible for the death of her infant daughter.  Initially Rama only has a professional interest, hoping to write a book about Coly's case, but she quickly becomes more emotionally invested.

The French justice system functions differently from the American one, and there's never a doubt that Coly is guilty of her crime.  What the court wants to determine is her motive, which seems impossible to untangle.  It surely has something to do with Coly's sad history as an Senegalese immigrant who came to France in search of a better life, became involved with a married man, Luc (Xavier Maly), and then grew isolated and unhappy.  The courtroom scenes are comprised of long monologues and dialogues where the camera is very static, often showing Coly as she speaks or listens to other speakers.  The more details we learn about her life, the less clear her motives become.  

Rama trying to process her responses to Coly's crime, and the lack of concrete answers, are what are truly at the heart of "Saint Omer..  She finds many parallels to her own life - the pregnancy, the relationship with her mother - even though the women couldn't be farther apart in society.  Coly's explanations make no sense to the court, and perhaps to the audience, but Rama perceives more.  The narrative is intensely personal, delivering an emotional resolution at the end of the film instead of a more traditional accounting of whether justice was done.  I'm sure some viewers will be infuriated by the film, but I found it a strong exploration of empathy and existential themes.    

"Till," directed by Chinonye Chukwu, is a more straightforward film, though it shares a few things in common with "Saint Omer."  It depicts the events surrounding the death of 14 year-old Emmett Till (Jalyn Hall), one of the atrocities that helped to spur the American Civil Rights movement.  The story is told from Emmett's POV until his murder, and then the POV of his mother, Mamie (Danielle Deadwyler), who is central to the aftermath of the murder and subsequent trial.  Thankfully the actual killing of Till is never shown, and we don't see the famously disfigured corpse except out of focus in the background.  The real horror is found in the film's depiction of the racist Mississippi community where the crime takes place.  

"Till" is built around Deadwyler's performance.  Mamie Till-Mobley is an admirable woman who understands that justice will not be done, but is compelled to speak against injustice despite this.  She seems an unlikely heroic figure, but history shows that she went on to be a prominent activist for the rest of her life.  Watching her find the strength to keep speaking out, despite the danger to her and her family, is very moving.  Deadwyler perfectly captures her transformation from grieving mother to the fearless caretaker of her son's legacy.  I'm generally wary of films that idealize historical figures, but in this case I appreciate that care is taken to show Till-Mobley - a figure most viewers won't be familiar with - in the best light possible.  Her costuming, her lighting, the way the shots are composed to emphasize her power and self-assuredness - all give Deadwyler exactly what she needs to make a lasting impression.

When I first heard that this film was being made, I was apprehensive.  I expected that it would either be another exercise in black trauma, emphasizing the depravity of what happened to Emmett Till, or worse a contrived, weepy courtroom drama.  "Till" managed to avoid being either, to my relief, because it's as much about Mamie Till-Mobley as it is about her son.  The story is tragic, but ultimately also manages to be uplifting.  I still don't know if this story is really suited for a film, but I think this is the best version we could hope for.  

 

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"Living" Isn't Quite Kurosawa

Akira Kurosawa's "Ikiru," which translates as "To Live," is one of my favorite films.  When I heard a British remake was being made, starring Bill Nighy and written by Kazuo Ishiguro, of all people, I was tentatively looking forward to it.  There's a long history of Western filmmakers remaking Kurosawa with good results, including "A Fisful of Dollars" and "The Magnificent Seven."  Alas, despite some good performances, "Living" isn't quite what I was hoping for.  

Ishiguro added a major character and adjusted a few relationships, but otherwise this is a very close retelling of the original story.  Nighy plays a career bureaucrat named Rodney Williams, the head of the Public Works department in London in 1953.  He leads a dull life, nicknamed "Mr. Zombie" at work, and sharing a home with his adult son and daughter-in-law, who largely ignore him.  When Mr. Williams receives a terminal medical diagnosis, he is faced with the question of how he wants to use his remaining months.  He spends time with a writer, Mr. Sutherland (Tom Burke), and one of his former employees, Mis Harris (Aimee Lou Wood), before coming to a surprising decision.  

"Living" is set in 1953, roughly the same era as "Ikiru."  This allows for the best idea in the film, which is to open with old footage of London in the 1950s, complete with vintage titles and credits.  Unfortunately, director Oliver Hermanus seems content to settle into a fairly pedestrian style after that.  He does a good job of highlighting the performances, and creating some nice moments of intimacy, but doesn't manage to come up with any memorable visuals.  It's not fair to compare Hermanus's work with Kurosawa's but I found myself deeply disappointed that one of the iconic images of "Ikiru" was reproduced in "Living" with much poorer results.  

Then there's the matter of Mr. Wakeling (Alex Sharp), a newer member of the Public Works department who is our POV character for a good portion of the film.  "Ikiru" famously has a two-part structure, where the first half follows the story from the hero's POV, and the second half is told through other characters, gradually filling in the details.  "Living" preserves this, but Ishiguro introduces Wakeling to provide a stronger, more sympathetic presence for the parts of the film where Mr. WIlliams is absent.  He's the youngster positioned to learn from Mr. Williams' example, and also helps to tie up a few loose threads with other characters. I don't know if it was the actor, but I found everything involving Wakeling to be too obvious and too unsubtle.      

I suspect that "Living" is one of those cases where such a faithful retelling didn't do the film any favors.  Japanese and British culture clearly have many things in common, but too often this felt like a copy/paste job.  I was disappointed that we didn't get to see more of the post-war London glimpsed in the opening frames of the film.  The best scenes involve Mr. Williams' developing relationship with Miss Harris, who gets a little more fleshing out than her counterpart in "Ikiru."  Miss Harris is more ambitious, more socially aware, and having a more difficult time in life. When Mr. Williams wants to spend time together socially, she's immediately concerned about the potential consequences for both of them.  

And that brings us to Bill Nighy, who is the main reason to see "Living."  It's a good role for him, and he does the part justice.  Mr. Williams is a quiet, dutiful, unassuming everyman, and it's impossible not to root for him.  It's terribly moving to see his uncertainty in the face of the inevitable, the little hints of how he's processing the bad news, and where his emotions finally spill over.  His transformation in the second half of the film is wonderful, but the structure of the film really does it no favors - especially the ending.  I'm glad that Nighy has gotten some attention for his work, but I can't help wishing that it were for a better film.           

Or maybe I'm just too close to the original to appreciate the charms of the remake. "Living" is one of the rare, simple, heartfelt melodramas of 2022 that feels like it has some real substance to it, and I hope its audience will find it.  

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Revisiting "Sailor Moon"

Viz Media recently put subtitled versions of several of their popular anime series on Youtube, including all 200 episodes of the original "Sailor Moon."  The show ran for five years in Japan from 1992 to 1997, but I'd only ever managed to see heavily censored versions of the first two seasons on syndicated American television, and later a handful of the unedited first season episodes.  Nevertheless, "Sailor Moon" had a huge impact on my viewing habits.  It was the first anime I counted myself a fan of, and it was my gateway to all kinds of cult and foreign media.

So, now that I had access to all the episodes, including the seasons I'd never seen before, it was time to revisit the Sailor Senshi.  Not having the time to watch everything, I cherry picked my way around the filler episodes, mostly watching the beginnings and endings of the major arcs.  A big chunk of my prior engagement with the series was through fanwork, so I was already pretty familiar with characters like the Outer Senshi and the Starlights, but it was nice to finally see everyone in action.  As I expected, the show doesn't hold up to adult scrutiny - it's aimed at a young audience, has haphazard worldbuilding, and is super repetitive by design -  but it's still fascinating to watch.  

The U.S. localization of the show, handled by DiC in the '90s, changed all the characters' names, added new music, and toned down the violence and darker storylines.  However, they couldn't hide everything.  The entire main cast was systematically killed off at the end of the first season before being magically resurrected, and no amount of editing could remove all the intensity and emotion from those final episodes.  No other kids' program I'd ever seen got that dark, and it's a big reason why the show stuck with me.  Years before the internet, schoolyard gossip clued me in to the fact that DiC had changed two feminine male villains into female ones.  When the third and fourth seasons were dubbed for Cartoon Network's Toonami block in the early 2000s, there was a ton of online chatter about how the lesbian senshi, Uranus and Neptune, were rewritten to be very affectionate cousins. The fifth season, featuring a trio of gender nonconforming senshi in risque battle outfits, never made it to broadcast or cable as far as I can tell.  Even now, the first two seasons of "Sailor Moon" on Youtube are rated TV-PG, but it's TV-14 once the lesbians show up.  At least Uranus and Neptune are finally acknowledged as a couple in the latest Viz dub.      

Watching the original Japanese versions, the show is remarkably blase about these elements.  Girls being in love with other girls and boys transforming into girls when they fight are hardly a big deal when you have Sailor Moon and Tuxedo Mask's bratty six year-old daughter from the future, Chibi-Usa, come to the past in the second season, join Sailor Moon's household, and constantly fight her future mother for her future father's attention.  Major characters get killed off multiple times, which I guess isn't so bad when they can be reincarnated or resurrected by the power of love, and nearly everyone is destined to live happily ever after in a far-future utopia anyway.   By modern standards, the portrayals of gender identity and sexuality are very rough.  There's a lot of outdated stereotyping and a lot of awkwardness.  And yet, it's tremendously heartening to see the show's wholehearted embrace of inclusivity, pacifism, and girl power.  Sailor Moon may be an overdramatic teenage girl, but her feelings are treated as important, and her capacity for love and empathy are what often save the day.  She makes friends with everyone, including most of her major villains, and accepts them for who they are.

The show was so ahead of its time, it still doesn't feel like the rest of us have quite caught up.  Twenty-five years later, the fifth season of "Sailor Moon" with the transgender senshi may still be too controversial for many modern viewers.  The influence of the show on both Japanese and western animation has been significant.  Pretty much every subsequent magical girl show owes a debt to "Sailor Moon."  On this side of the ocean, the recent crop of LGBT friendly cartoons like "She-Ra," and "Steven Universe," have taken cues from the Sailor Senshi too, with some creators citing it as a direct influence.  Despite the show initially not doing well in the U.S., it attracted a dedicated fan base that helped keep "Sailor Moon" on the air in some markets, and eventually led to the unedited episodes being released on home media.  To this day, I can't think of a female-led anime series that is more widely beloved.  

I haven't had a chance to check out "Sailor Moon Crystal," which is a remake of "Sailor Moon" with different aesthetics but no apparent increase in budget.  Frankly, I'm not impressed by the animation quality and especially not the CGI heavy transformation sequences.  The original series might have been limited by its budget and resources, but it produced some iconic hand-drawn animation over the years.  The OP and ED sequences and all the variations of the transformation sequences have been my favorite parts of this rewatch.  

That, and finally figuring out which senshi had the notorious "Star Gentle Uterus" attack. I love "Sailor Moon," but but I'm not going to ignore that when it was terrible, it was *terrible.*  No matter how things change, "Sailor Moon" is always going to appeal to a niche audience, and that's just fine.  It's good to know the show is still there for those of us who appreciate it.

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